Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Top 10 Video Games of 2012

10. Torchlight II

Torchlight II may be another prepossessing click-festival of studied, refined imitation — an extension of Torchlight‘s
budget-priced, high-gloss loot game with multiplayer sewn in. But it’s
arguably seen a little further, if only by standing on the shoulders of
giants (and goatmen, dryads, droog, machae, bugbear necromancers and
siren’s daughters). In that sense, it remains unabashedly Blizzard-like,
a greatest hits of greatest hits albums, an amalgam of amalgams. But
where Blizzard still wants $60 for a game like Diablo III,
developer Runic continues to upend traditional sales models by asking
just $20 for a no less polished action roleplaying game, with at least
as much content.

9. Halo 4

“This is as close as I could get us,” says Cortana, your A.I. companion not long after Halo 4 begins. “Hope you don’t mind hoofin’ it a little.” This explains a lot about Halo 4 and the Halo
series in general. You’re never very close to where you’re going,
because, well, what fun would that be? It has a price, of course, the
story twisting and conforming to serve the game, every route the longest
one, every puzzle an excuse to send you through gauntlets of aliens.
And yet that’s what we love about Halo, and Halo 4
does it better than any game since the original, adding some of the
shrewdest enemies (the Prometheans) the series has yet seen.

8. LittleBigPlanet

A
tiny button-cute biped voguing burlap and Clouseau costumery, who
bounds through lush, gloriously absurd backdrops that look like dioramas
of childhood creations as imagined with markers, stickers, pieces of
felt and bits of scribbled-on cardboard. That’s LittleBigPlanet, the game that looks and plays like no other. As sidescrollers go, there’s nothing — not even the latest Mario
games — that surpasses it. The Vita version offers the same genius
level design punctuated by the handheld’s unique front-back touchpad
controls, as well as the welcome option to design and share thousands of
levels with other Vita players on the go.

7. The Last Story

The Last Story
is like an opera played through smartphone speakers — a magnificent,
galloping stampede of a game with a memorable story, exquisite battles,
lively tactics, grand vistas and elegant tableaus somehow running on
Nintendo’s antiquated hardware. It’s as if someone took developer
Mistwalker’s stunning Lost Odyssey engine, glued that onto a
completely different game, then crammed everything into a console with
the heart of a computer half a decade old. You’ll play little that looks
as dated this year, but only one roleplaying game that’s better (Xenoblade Chronicles), and even then, it’s a close thing.

6. Papo & Yo

Indie puzzler Papo & Yo
is a video game through and through: It has climbable ladders,
autosaving, platforms you tap a gamepad to jump between and literal
geometry-bending conundrums whose solutions enable passage from one area
to another. And yet it’s also a playable metaphor for something much
darker: the tortured relationship between an abusive father and his
terrified son. But instead of melodrama, the game preaches reverie.
Instead of nightmarish scenery, you’re treated to dilapidated yet
beautifully sunlit favela-scapes that groove with soothing, trance-like
tunes. This is big idea-gaming at its finest, testing your brain with
clever twisters, but also your emotions as you attempt to cure a
bumbling monster of his sinister vice.

5. Assassin’s Creed III

In Assassin’s Creed III,
we come to the end at last — dozens of games, books, comics, live
action and animated short films, and a standalone encyclopedia later,
five years after first poking our hook-cowled heads into the world of
Altaïr ibn La-Ahad and protagonist Desmond Miles. While the last few
games rehashed too much, the final chapter riffs effectively on its
historical setting, sending you clambering over colonial rooftops and
dangling from eaves and gables, but also leaping between snow-dusted
tree branches and scrambling up the sides of battleship-gray wilderness
cliffs. Sequences still play like micro-sandboxes, challenging you to
try and try again using different tactics, studying defenses, testing
until you find approaches that work. Even then, this is the most
situationally fluid Assassin’s Creed, varying patrol routes and
enemy positions, forcing you to move as they move, waiting for the
right moment to dart up a wall or ship side and snatch someone over the
edge into oblivion.

4. Dishonored

The last time a stealth game came together as well as Dishonored was probably 1998′s Thief: The Dark Project.
This is sandbox-sneaking at its finest as you slink through a beautiful
steampunk-verse, lingering over objects strewn on shelves, empty
bottles, teacups, coins, “audiograph” players that offer snippets of
story, tins of edible brined or jellied or potted food or leaf through
books and reading excerpts on the esoteric practices of the world’s
institutions. Best of all, your choice to play either subtly or
violently has real consequences, altering the physical game world and
dynamically transforming the game’s storyline.

3. XCOM: Enemy Unknown

A turn-based strategy game after all these years? On consoles? As Mulder might say, believe it. XCOM
distills (without oversimplifying) the best parts of what made the
original 1994 PC game so captivating. And like that game, this one’s
virtues lie largely in its spooky atmospherics: creeping through
buildings or over rooftops after dark, hunkering along curbs, park
benches, water fountains or inside abandoned buses, exploring a fire-lit
forest in the wake of a UFO crash, wondering when some alien Sectoid or
Muton or Floater might pop into view wielding a crazy extraterrestrial
weapon that’ll drop any of your squad members dead with a single
well-aimed shot.

2. Xenoblade Chronicles

Xenoblade Chronicles
is game-making at an Olympic scale, from its ever-deepening battle
system to its grand alien expanses, inhabited by hundreds of creatures
(including several the size of skyscrapers). Instead of level-clearing,
where you work over an area then never come back, retreading is
essential. But Xenoblade Chronicles makes it worth your while,
slow-feeding its bonuses and mysteries and gameplay change-ups so that
just when you’re bored with activity X, along comes diversion Y or
undertaking Z. In that sense, it’s mastered a trick few games ever do:
keeping you riveted while making that bid for your attention seem
effortless.

1. Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2
is one of those rare games that unexpectedly knocks your life
off-kilter, like a meteoroid banging into a satellite. Call it the
pinball machine of MMOs, devoted to keeping you entertained by the
minute, whatever you’re doing. You’ll get into snowball fights, go on
scavenger hunts for eggs, play catch with barrels, defend homesteads
from ice worms, protect towns from bear hordes and knock out enemy
portals that spawn creatures like the Chitauri in The Avengers. All those events and hundreds more play out in real-time — with, as Bono would say, or without you, lending Guild Wars 2 the feel of a living world, and the sort of compulsive anywhere-you-go playability other MMOs only dream of.